*Blow Torch Chicken Art Ignites the Venus of Willendorf
Ever been drawn in by someone and not known why? Have you ever been irrevocably changed in a parking lot? Were there blow torches and chicken and art involved?
I've actually had some pretty notable parking lot encounters. I met Majid in a parking lot when I was a virgin. When we were dating he tried to change that in another parking lot outside his restaurant. Who knows if he would have been successful, because we were stopped by the local Sheriff's department—at 3:00 a.m. The officer noticed my car with fogged-up windows rolling backwards from one side of the parking lot to the other. We had accidentally released the emergency brake during our parking lot ardor. That was pretty momentous, but it didn't really change me irrevocably—I eventually stopped dating Majid and stayed a virgin for awhile longer. In the parking lot of a coffee shop I worked at once, a married customer emphatically tried to persuade me to join him at a hotel. There was a heartbreaking Spaniard who seduced me from a car park on an island in a sea, but that's a different story—one I've already written and archived. What intrigues me presently like nothing has in a very long time is the face and presence of a man I can't forget. A man I don't know and will never see again. And yet I feel like I've always known him or at least I have been waiting for what he would show me about myself in a parking lot. Because of my serendipitous crush from afar, I also became enchanted with performance art and new ways of expressing things I've always thought about.
When I saw him I was in rehearsals for a play that is best described as
Saturday Night Live meets the History Channel. It was for the second show I've done with Beyond the Proscenium Productions at the Wilkerson Theatre next to California Stage. The theatre is in what I can only describe as this great little artist's enclave in Midtown Sacramento. There are a few theatres, artist galleries, and a poetry center all surrounding a gravely parking lot where empty paint cans, lumber, and assorted discarded objects decorate its boundaries.And one night performance artists arrived at our little enclave. Gallery SoToDo, "a non-profit organization whose goal is to promote international cultural exchanges within the context of Performance Art", rented our theatre for a three-day international congress for Performance Art. Gallery SoToDo says, "Performance Art is defined by the elements of time, space, variability and zeitgeist. It is an everyday experience. It is unbound by a beginning or an end. It happens."
I saw him. And it happened to me. I was enchanted and then transfixed and enthralled and awakened. And the performance is still going on, long after he and this band of traveling artists has left our little theatre parking lot. But how they used the body in their art stays with and transforms me.
I've always been interested in the use and image of the body in performance. I have everyday issues with my own body—rubenesque (i.e, voluptuous, zaftig, BBW, fat, large, etc—pick your poison or elixir) in a rail-thin world to say the least. I've been thin and I've been unthin. And I've experienced love and lust, adoration and humliation, and hope and loss on the pound pendulum. As a performer I often find myself trying to justify my image against the theatrically-scripted image of the body as well as society's idea of the body—they are rarely in agreement. As a sexual woman I've felt marginalized, fetishized, objectified, and even desired as a modern-day Venus of Willendorf. And it's the disagreement between the image of the theatrically-scripted body, society's desires for and of my body, and my personal experiences that inform a lot of my writing and exploration as an artist.
There is art in this disagreement. And this group of performance artists has excavated a little of me, unearthed and edged me one step closer to figuring out how I want to express that art and my feelings. I like discordance in a world that perfers conformity and homogenization. Some of the art I saw unabashedly used the body to express and create art. One of the artists coated his naked body in what appeared to be black paint as he burned pieces of paper with phrases on them with a blow torch. I don't know what the narrative of the piece was and it didn't matter to me. I indulged in the images alone. I saw the juxtaposition of the natural topography of the human form with the need to control communication, by creating it and then destroying it. I might have missed the intent of the artist, but what I took away is valuable nonetheless.
And the face, the man that drew me in to this art in the first place performed on another night. A night I'm not normally at the theatre when not in performance, I came hoping to see him. To see his art. And I did. As I entered the gravely parking lot he was there, and I gave a shy, "Hello". Not long after, he and two other men performed. Again, while I may not have correctly deduced their narrative of the piece, I was viscerally moved by the images, the sounds, and even the smell of their art. One man sat down wearing a motorcycle helmet with a BBQ-like stove attached to it. It was a functioning BBQ with flames worthy of any choice cut of meat. The other two men defeathered a chicken, butchered it, and cooked it on top of the stove-wearing man's head. Once the chicken was cooked, the men offered it to the audience, myself included. The primal images—fire, the origin of the food, the journey from animal to flame, and how it was manipulated by man to be consumed by man was moving. And the line between audience and art was blurred by the offering of chicken. This performance reminds us that the audience is as much a part of the art and the performance as the art and performers themselves. I was moved by a man with a blow torch who cooked a chicken in a parking lot on another man's head.
This will surely make my friend Marcos say his oft repeated mantra, "Oh Lord, Luthy, you're a wannabe artsy bohemian." He'll probably add, "would you be as attracted and interested if he had a bic lighter and a can of Spam?!" Probably, yes I would. He has more knowledge of my eccentric attractions than almost anyone. He's witnessed it and I can't dispute his authority on the subject of me and my predilections. I can't explain my attractions. I only know that the strongest ones are the most intangible—they have a chemistry unique to Kellie. My friend is sure to think that I'll want to run off and join the circus to make art and that I will write a play about blow torches and chicken; that I'll find a way to make it erotic and poetic. Maybe he's not entirely wrong. Maybe he's entirely right.
I have these images flashing through my mind's eye now. And whether they manifest in poetry, theatre, or something more abstract and daring is yet to be known. But they have been cultivated these past few days watching art trespass through our rehearsal and take over a parking lot normally used for backstage exits and entrances. Sometimes we have to reinvent the stage, shift the proscenium arch, and maybe even burn down that fourth wall and consume it.
Irrevocable changes happen in parking lots where men wield blow torches and cook chicken in orange jumpsuits only once in a blue moon. I'm happy and grateful that the cosmos ventured into my orbit for once.
Sometimes you are going through your life and someone trespasses, or so it
seems at first, right through your rehearsal. I only know him from his hat, a few exchanged glances, and one shy hello. And I've realized he didn't trespass our rehearsal, he became part of my rehearsal as an artist and a person. And that is an irrevocable change I needed. Oh...and he really was that sexy. That kind of matters too.Isn't it strange what a random glance, a person's aura, the inexplicable attraction you feel towards them, and a little blow torch and fire can inspire? I'm sure he wouldn't remember me or feel the same as me and I don't know where he is, but I thank him. I'll take a sexy chicken-cooking muse like him any day!
**Said blow torch chicken artist has read this blog and responded that he was thankful that his art inspired and that he was always worried that he "did it for only himself and not others."









